CHINA: EMPEROR AND BOATS. – Yang Ti, Sui emperor of China (604-618), and his fleet of sailing craft, including a dragon boat being pulled along the Grand Canal. Painted silk scroll, 17th century.. Fine Art. Britannica ImageQuest, Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 May 2016.
quest.eb.com/search/140_1707542/1/140_1707542/cite. Accessed 29 Jan 2019.
Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about canals. We’re all familiar with the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal. If you studied elementary school music when I did, you learned the American folk song, “The Erie Canal.” It does seem strange to me, however, that I had never even heard of the longest man-made canal in the world. Stretching well over 1,000 miles (think NYC to Miami) from Hangzhou to Tianjin, construction started nearly 2,500 years ago during the Spring and Autumn period. It didn’t really become the “Grand Canal” 京杭大運河 Jīng-Háng Dà Yùnhé though until the short lived Sui Dynasty, about a thousand years later. When completed, it connected the Yellow River 黄河 Huáng Hé, the Qiantang River 钱塘江 Qiántáng Jiāng, and the Huai River 淮河 Huái Hé, with the Yangtze River 长江 Cháng Jiāng and, through a series of tributaries extended west all the way to the ancient capital of Chang’An 長安 (near present day Xi’An 西安).
Sui Emperor Yang Di (隋炀帝 Suí Yángdì) conscripted upwards of 5 million people to build the section of the Grand Canal from Luoyang to Beijing during the Sui Dynasty. Nearly one of three of these laborers died. It was created to transport grain from southern China to Beijing and was also used to supply and reenforce military operations. When finished, Emperor Yangdi traveled on a huge boat pulled by hundreds of men. The canal was 40 metres wide, large enough to transport boats which could carry over 100 people. In many ways, the Grand Canal is reminiscent of the Great Wall. It was a labor intensive project which took many centuries to complete.
Some of the most amazing parts of the Grand Canal, however, are the locks. These are the parts of a canal used for raising and lowering boats, enabling them to navigate in significantly lower or higher terrain. The way a “pound lock” works is by using the gates at either end of a chamber to “lock” water in where the boat is positioned. The gates control the amount of water let in, thus raising and lowering the level of water in the chamber allowing the boats to float up or lower down. Pound locks were first created by the Chinese on the Grand Canal during the 10th century. Altogether, there were 24 locks on the Grand Canal.
To my knowledge, Joseph Needham (李約瑟Lǐ Yuē sè), never made it to the Grand Canal. He did, however, recognize both the significance of the “pound lock” and the magnificence of the Grand Canal in Science and Civilization in China, his epic compendium of scientific discoveries and inventions in China.
According to Arthur Toynbee in the London Observer, Joseph Needham was able “. . . to interpret the Chinese mind in Western terms, and he is perhaps unique among living scholars in possessing the necessary combinations of qualifications for this formidable undertaking. The practical importance of Dr. Needham’s work is as great as its intellectual interest. It is a Western act of ‘recognition’ on a higher plane than the diplomatic one.“
Joseph Needham, like the Grand Canal, was quite remarkable. In his early 20’s, already an esteemed scholar and biochemist at Cambridge, Needham knew very little about China until 1937, when he became infatuated with both the Chinese language and a young female biochemist from China by the name of Lu Gui Zhen. Already fluent in seven languages, at the age of 37, Needham decided to learn Chinese. Within 2 years, he could read nearly 5000 Chinese characters and was able to read authentic Chinese classical texts. He made his first trip to China in 1943, towards the end of WW2, when the Japanese occupied vast portions of China. By flying “over the hump” (the Himalayas) to Kunming in the province of Yunnan, he was able to set up and office and lab at a university in Chongqing, Sichuan. As the result of several chance encounters during the course of his research, Needham became aware of the magnitude of China’s scientific acheivements and contributions to the world and was appalled that most of the world outside of China was ignorant of those contributions. So, Needham started a quest which was to be continued throughout the rest of his life. He would enlighten the West about China’s genius through a series of books he was prepared to write. By the time of his death in 1995, 17 volumes of Science and Civilization in China had gone to print and they rocked the world of science as the West had come to know it. In a strange twist, it rocked the world of many Chinese as well.
If you’re not quite ready to jump into Science and Civilization in China, but are curious about Joseph Needham, I strongly recommend listening to Lazslo Montgomery’s 2-part podcast, #’s 155 & 156 from his amazing China History podcast:
https://www.teacup.media/2015/06/24/chp-155-joseph-needham-part-1/
https://www.teacup.media/2015/07/14/chp-156-joseph-needham-part-2/
A fantastic book about Joseph Needham, published in 2009, is the New York Times best-seller, The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester. Also, strongly recommended by moi.
Chinese Odyssey 36
In the Sui (before Tang)
a long, long time ago,
China built a canal
from Beijing to Hangzhou.
A million men worked
so that Emperor Yang Di
could inspect his kingdom
in pompous luxury.
The Panda in the Room PD 